Voting on Principle

This is a letter that was written to "The 2% Solution," a column in the Mensa Bulletin. It is dated January 7, 2002:

The question is "How can we persuade citizens to vote for principles as opposed to mindlessly following a particular party or person? Put another way, how can we get people to vote for principles instead of principals? Further, woild that coal be desirable?"

To understand how to get people to vote for principles, one must understand why people vote for principals. The current reality is that to vote for one's principles is a wasted vote. Take the last presidential election as a clear example. Watching the returns come in I found it was true in state after state, the candidate who won did so with far less than 50% of the vote. The difference was taken up by Ralph Nader, and other "third party" candidates.

Put another way, a good percentage of the population was given the candidate they least desired because they chose to vote on principle. Those people who voted for Ralph Nader, for example, probably would have preferred Al Gore to George Bush. They voted their principles and were soundly punished. Similarly, about .5% of the people voted for Harry Brown, the Libertarian candidate. Their view is that their vote almost put Al Gore in the White house.

And "the Media" tends to emphasis this, calling Ralph Nader a "spoiler." (The Libertarians are mostly just ignored.)

Therefore, if you want people voting for principles, eliminate this "spoiler affect." That is, require that every election be won by a clear majority, as is done in a lot of other countries, and in a lot of State election here. If there is no clear majority, then hold a runoff. This last presidential election would have had runoffs in many States, but there would have been a clear winner, and no "spoilers" at all. Then the first round could be seen as a vote on principles, ant the second as a vote on principals if and when the former fails.

Personally, I doubt this will ever happen short of a revolution because currently the Democrats and Republicans have a stranglehold on power in the United States. If people voted principles, I suspect that the major parties would be the Green party and the Libertarian party.